Politics and Manners from Sir Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel

Proceedings of the British Academy, 94, 103–125 RALEIGH LECTURE ON HISTORY Politics and Manners from Sir Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel PAUL LANGFORD Lincoln College, Oxford Fellow of the Academy IN 1839 LORD MELBOURNE’S GOVERNMENT was re-established following the so-called ‘Bedchamber Crisis’. His reconstructed Cabinet included several newcomers. One was the historian Thomas Babington Macau- lay, who approached his duties with characteristic impetuosity. Indeed, as Lord Holland recorded in his Diary, he was presented to the Queen at Windsor and attended two Cabinet meetings before one of the other new members had even replied to Melbourne’s invitation to join the administration.1 This precipitate appearance at Windsor resulted in two unexpected embarrassments. The first concerned the Queen’s daily cavalcade in Windsor Great Park, which ministers on duty at the Castle were expected to attend. Macaulay’s horsemanship was not up to this test and he had to decline the honour, explaining that elephant-riding in India had left him unfitted for equestrian feats.2 This was only a ripple of unease on the surface of court life but the second embarrassment is better known and was more awkward. While at Windsor, Macaulay wrote to his Edinburgh constituents, on notepaper headed Windsor Castle, a breach both of royal etiquette and good breeding. In this case the ripples spread beyond the Court and culminated in a Press campaign deploring the unsuitability of certain modern Cabinet Read at the Academy 7 November 1996, at Edinburgh 26 November 1996. q The British Academy 1997. 1 The Holland House Diaries 1831–1840, ed. Abraham D. Kriegel (London, 1977), p. 411. 2 Ibid. Copyright © The British Academy 1997 – all rights reserved 104 Paul Langford appointments. No lasting harm was done, but the episode retained a symbolic significance later recalled by Thackeray on Macaulay’s death in 1859. Thackeray perhaps went too far in comparing Macaulay as champion of the middle class at Windsor to Napoleon dating his letters from the imperial palace of Scho¨nbrunn after the Battle of Austerlitz, but he was in no doubt where the ultimate victory in the war of manners lay. ‘That miserable ‘‘Windsor Castle’’ outcry’, he wrote, ‘is an echo out of fast-retreating old-world remembrances.’3 My concern this evening is to reconstruct a portion of that old world and to recapture something of the manners of politicians as they evolved between the two careers of two Sir Roberts, Walpole and Peel. During this period Britain invented a form of parliamentary government which was thought to have no parallel in contemporary experience and no precedent in recorded history. The constitutional implications were and are much debated. Less attention has been paid to the codes regulating the relationships of the men who lived through them. Yet what emerged between the Revolution of 1688 and the Great Reform Act of 1832 was a system of management, and management, as we are often reminded today, perhaps to the point of tedium, is a matter of style (or as the eighteenth century would have called it, manners) as well as technique. What was the distinctive style required of those who managed the modern British polity in its formative years? The question is an obvious one if only because the eighteenth century was itself so fascinated by manners and the structures that sustained them. Yet it is not often explicitly asked. This may be because the evidence of public life is almost too voluminous to be comfortably managed. Moreover, some of the short cuts which suggest themselves turn out to be dead-ends. One such is the literature which consciously codified manners, a source which historians have used extensively for other purposes. Between the two Sir Roberts there was no shortage of such material, ranging from the courtesy books read by Walpole’s contemporaries to the mass-market etiquette guides of Peel’s day. Yet in this ocean of advice about how to behave, it is remarkable how little relates to politics. The most quoted of all such works, Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son, though addressed by a statesman of the first rank to a young man intended for a public career, has little to say about political advancement and nothing about the conditions which prevailed at the time of writing, in the 1740s. The 3 G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (2nd edn., London, 1886), p. 388. Copyright © The British Academy 1997 – all rights reserved POLITICS AND MANNERS 105 occasional exception, such as Thomas Gisborne’s An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain of 1795, offered only pious injunctions against ‘unchristian behaviour’ and in favour of the ‘public welfare’.4 The deficiency is all the more remarkable when it is recalled that there existed an older tradition of public instruction on this subject. The so-called ‘Book of Policy’ was a distinct branch of courtesy literature, well known in England as elsewhere. Yet it disappeared at just that moment when a revolution in government might have made its revision and reissue pertinent. The eighteenth century possessed nothing similar. It had ‘vade-mecums’ for various officials, from magistrates to excise officers, but these were in the nature of professional manuals. They told the would-be administrator what to do, not how to conduct himself. Those publications which did offer instruction on this point were in the nature of moral tracts, often written by clergymen who had first aired them as sermons. Explicit guidance to young politicians on the make was rarely attempted. Politics was surely the only trade, craft or profes- sion of which this was true. Historians of the early modern Book of Policy have noted that ‘policy tends to drop out of the English courtesy tradition’ and concluded that the eighteenth century had ceased to be interested in what they call the ‘production of a social leader’.5 A pioneer in this field eventually appeared in 1836 with the pub- lication of The Statesman by the poet and civil servant Henry Taylor. Taylor’s advice described upbringing and schooling, making contacts and acquiring a leader or followers, cultivating an official language, conducting interviews, and so on. The author’s intention is said to have been satirical, though he denied it in his Autobiography.6 In any event, his advice was severely practical and plainly derived from his experience as a clerk in the Colonial Office. It ranged from avoiding the use of metaphor in official despatches to the placing of furniture in a Cabinet minister’s room so as to minimise the discomfort to all parties when interviews did not go well. Taylormadenoapologyfortheseeming triviality. ‘These are not frivolous considerations where civility is the 4 2 vols. ( 2nd edn., London, 1795), i, chs 6, 7. 5 J. E. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making: Studies in the History of English Courtesy Literature and Related Topics from 1531 to 1774 (Philadelphia, 1935), pp. 219–20, 252; see also, George C. Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman: Theories of Gentlemanly Education In England, 1660–1775 (New York, 1959), pp. 61–2: ‘For the eighteenth-century gentleman, the world seemed to imply mainly polite society, conversation, and social intercourse in general.’ 6 Autobiography of Henry Taylor, 1800–1875, 2 vols. (London, 1885), i, p. 202. Copyright © The British Academy 1997 – all rights reserved 106 Paul Langford business to be transacted’, he said.7 The hostile reception accorded The Statesman helps to explain the previous neglect of the subject. To write on political advancement without appearing cynical on the one hand or satirical on the other was in truth difficult. William Maginn in Fraser’s Magazine suggested that a better title for Taylor’s book would have been ‘The Art of Official Humbug systematically digested and famil- iarly explained’.8 Another stand-by of historians of manners, literary sources, are not more helpful. Clara Reeve’s celebrated manifesto for the novel as a portrait of ‘real life and manners’ might lead one to expect that real politics would figure in such works.9 It is true that novels of the period feature innumerable peers, MPs, and even ministers, but their political activities are rarely described. There was evidently a sensitive spot on the psyche of the eighteenth-century patriciate. It was quite feasible to denounce the horrors of political corruption in almost every form of polemic: parliamentary, journalistic, poetic. But to depict the effects on the lives of the gentlefolk who peopled the pages of fiction seems to have been thought too daring. When Maria Edgeworth attempted it in her book Patronage in 1814, she had an uncomfortable time. She seems to have repented of her temerity in this respect, observing in 1831 that to depict the ‘ways of rising in the world . to say the best is very problematical in point of morality’.10 By then, of course, political novels in the sense that we would recognise them had started appearing fromthepensofPlumerWard,Normanby, Lytton, and Disraeli, and thereafter there was no stopping them. ‘No nation other than Victorian- Edwardian Britain has ever explored its elective institutions so extensively in fiction’, it has been observed.11 The contrast with Georgian Britain, which definitively empowered these elective institutions, is the more remarkable. For a starting point then, I am driven to another source, the satire which was directed against the ruling manners, especially by the Augu- stans. It is of course little better than propaganda, but it does have the 7 Ibid., pp. 58–9. 8 14 (1836), 393–8. 9 J.

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